Search

It seems the PR people of Katherine Jenkins have been quick to tell the Daily Mail that she has been awarded an OBE in the queen’s new year’s honours ‘for her work breaking down barriers to propagate classical music, charity fundraising and the support she shows for Britain’s Armed Forces’ if propagating classical music is singing the same four arias in a career lasting a decade that doesn’t appear to be a very intensive schedule for the Welsh star. The playlist that she garbled through at the music festival of Raymond Blanc’s Les Manoir aux Quat’Saisons in 2012 is a good indication the kind of trash counts as dissemination of classical music to bankers and others that would pay £450 for gourmet food and amateur screeching.

As you know I don’t really care for any “honours” given out by an unelected head of state of an empire that has long since died out. Those awards are usually a pat on the back for all of those that suck up to the political establishment.

But what makes me uncomfortable is that a manufactured nobody that can barely stay in tune and sing straight to a microphone, again is called an opera singer by the Daily Mail and fêted with a spread in The Daily Express (I presume they had a page left spare from their latest reporting on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales).

For a large part of the population…especially the middle Englanders that the DM targets, an OBE offers a legitimacy to someone of such limited accomplishment and study in her chosen field like Katherine Jenkins. It makes a mockery of many hard working artists that sing their heart out and are equated to a classical crooner of no real distinction. All she represents is the get rich quick culture that hooks on distasteful sentimentality, the wilful shit peddling of the record companies and taking advantage of an ignorant public.

Over on Twitter we have been making up suitable takes on what OBE should stand for when it refers to our dear Katherine, here’s a selection so far: